I’m really glad we did this. I thought it would be helpful for me to understand the story better. Crack reporting by a number of news organizations have already identified most of the unnamed people in the Papadopoulos plea agreement document. But that’s not quite the sentence as reading the document and the individual sentences with the names of the people in place of anonymized titles like “high ranking campaign official” or “campaign supervisor.” So Allegra Kirkland pulled the reporting together and edited the document to replace those titles with the names of the people who published reports have now securely identified. Check it out.

In March of 2016 Donald Trump was getting a growing number of questions about who was advising him on foreign policy. He did not seem to have any foreign policy advisors. So when he met with The Washington Post editorial board on March 21st he announced a team of five foreign policy advisors. Walid Phares, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Joe Schmitz, and ret. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg.

One of the more comical sub-threads of the Papadopoulos story is his comically inept efforts to hide his digital tracks even after he’d lied to the FBI in two successive interviews, one without his lawyer and then another with counsel present. It’s enough to make you think he’s not familiar with the surveillance state. But more prosaically, he didn’t seem to realize there’s a thing called warrants. Allegra Kirkland has the story.

Ta-Nehisi Coates did a systematic take-down of John Kelly after he presented a revisionist history of the Civil War on Laura Ingraham’s new show on Fox last night. You can see that here. Kelly’s key points were that the cause (and for us the lesson) of the Civil War was an unwillingness to compromise and that Robert E. Lee was an “honorable” man.

While the world was marveling at Trump’s crowd size fetish during that fateful first week of his presidency, George Papadopoulos and allegedly Mike Flynn were lying to the FBI, Sally Yates was scrambling to warn the White House, and Donald Trump himself was pressing Jim Comey for personal loyalty in a private dinner. Notably, the seeds of what would become the first charges in the special counsel probe came four months before Robert Mueller arrived on the scene. Sam Thielman reviews the newly updated timeline for the last week of January.

Away from the podium, Trump staffers fretted privately over whether Manafort or Gates might share with Mueller’s team damaging information about other colleagues. They expressed concern in particular about Gates because he has a young family, may be more stretched financially than Manafort, and continued to be involved in Trump’s political operation and had access to the White House, including attending West Wing meetings after Trump was sworn in.

Rick Gates is 45, 23 years younger than Manafort. He was also with Trump much longer than Manafort. Any guesses about whether he saw anything bad when he was in the Trump orbit?

Will Fischer is a nationally recognized progressive leader. A decorated Marine Corps veteran of the war in Iraq, he is the director of government affairs for VoteVets, which, with more than 500,000 members, is the largest progressive veterans organization in America (and was also blocked on Twitter by President Donald Trump in June). Prior to his work at VoteVets, Will spent nearly a decade working at the national AFL-CIO and in a variety of political, legislative, and organizing campaigns across the country.

Will will be in the Hive to discuss veterans, military, and foreign policy. Post your questions and join us on Thursday! If you’d like to participate but don’t have TPM Prime, sign up here.